Welcome. Sign in to Visual Studio.

Applications today are leveraging the cloud to deliver personalized experiences and offer new capabilities. So it’s no surprise the tool used to build those applications is also putting the connected developer at the center of the IDE.

In Visual Studio 2012, a few features already offered connected experiences that brought online services to specific features in Visual Studio. Team Explorer was one of the first by connecting developers to team development and collaboration tools in the cloud through Team Foundation Services online. Windows Store has integration into the Windows Store projects allowing you to reserve, associate and publish your Windows Store applications from within the IDE.

In Visual Studio 2013 Preview you can sign in to Visual Studio with a Microsoft account to enable features like synchronized settings that will roam with you to your other Visual Studio devices. This is just the beginning of a personalized and productive connected experience that over time will include more features taking advantage of the primary Microsoft account to deliver value to you, the developer.

In this post, I want to share some of what’s going on under the covers, the concepts that we’ve defined as part of this new capability and how we’ve arrived at experiences that make the connected IDE.

One human, many online identities

Our first step was to understand how developers use online identities across their work and personal lives. Most developers we surveyed actively used at least 2 or more Microsoft accounts for their regular development. Some online identities were created to represent their work personas and manage assets associated with an organization like their employer or a consulting client. Other identities were created to be shared and represent a team activity like credentials used to publish apps on the Windows Store. Of the online identities a developer used, one of them was often used as a primary account for personal activity such as email, recognition, and other personal information. Typically this primary online identity was also associated to mobile devices like their Windows 8 tablets and phones.

To model how developers work with multiple online identities we are introducing a top level online identity, for you to sign in with your existing Microsoft account, that is the primary online identity for the Visual Studio IDE and represents you the human. This identity is used to synchronize your settings across all your devices and stays active even when using a feature like Team Explorer or Store publishing with its own connections. You can sign in to Visual Studio on all your devices with this personal identity and Visual Studio will download your preferred settings like theme and key bindings and keep all devices in sync that are signed in under this identity. We’ll have more detail about how we built the roaming settings experience and the settings we roam in another post.

To enable switching between connections that may use different identities without prompting for credentials all the time, we added a secure credential storage to store connections you’ve used. Team Explorer now uses these stored connections to remember credentials for multiple Team Foundation Service accounts. Team Explorer also can switch between team projects in different Team Foundation Service accounts each with their own identity without prompting you to authenticate each time you switch accounts.

Visual Studio automatically keeps you signed in to your primary online identity and remembers the credentials so settings immediately start roaming and you can quickly access Team Foundation Service accounts without having to enter your password each time. The credentials storage is Windows User specific and is only available to that user. To disconnect a connection you need to manually sign out and Visual Studio will remove those credentials from the device.

Welcome. Sign in to Visual Studio.

One of the important benefits of synchronizing your Visual Studio settings is to make setting up a new device quick and easy. To get you up and running on new machines more quickly we redesigned the first launch experience to integrate your online identity so Visual Studio starts up with your preferred settings.

I’ll describe below the two “first launch” experiences you will see: the real first, on your first Visual Studio 2013 device, where you establish a profile and associated settings, and a first use on subsequent devices.

The first time you sign in on your first Visual Studio 2013 device, we’ll ask you for some information to personalize your profile as well as your preferred theme color and initial environment settings. We’ll remember these choices for you. If you sign in to a new device with Visual Studio 2013, we will download and set your choices automatically. Of course you can always change these and other settings any time and we’ll make sure they roam to all your devices.

You can use any valid Microsoft account to sign in to the Visual Studio 2013 Preview. We recommend you sign in with the Microsoft account you have associated with your MSDN subscription or Team Foundation Service account for the best experience. If you have multiple Microsoft accounts just pick the one you use most often like the account associated with your Windows 8 device.For now we only support Microsoft accounts but we are looking at expanding our options in the future.

The identity card

If you skipped signing in when first running VS2013, you can sign in anytime from the identity card in the upper right corner of the IDE. Once you sign in, the identity card will give you quick access to useful identity information: your name and avatar, active TFS account or server, team project, and username as well as shortcuts to other connected IDE tasks.

The Account Settings dialog also enables you to access your Visual Studio profile and tosign out from Visual Studio. When you sign out of Visual Studio from the account settings dialog we disconnect your primary online identity. After signing out your personal information is removed from the identity card and Visual Studio stops roaming settings to or from this device but leaves behind the last settings we synced before you signed out. Sign out of the account settings is not a global sign out so you will still need to sign out of other connected experiences within Visual Studio separately.

Why have a 14 day trial on a Preview release?

We think many of you will sign in and leverage the capabilities that come with signing in, so we want to make sure our online services can handle all of our users registering and synchronizing settings across all their devices with Visual Studio 2013. Leading to this Preview release, we have done load simulation internally, and wanted to extend this verification to real use. In the coming weeks, we will be monitoring service health, measuring service responsiveness, improving performance, and responding to live site issues as they come up, as well as reviewing your feedback on all the connected experiences. By asking all of you to sign in to this pre-release we hope to gather usage data to scale out and support millions of connected users by the time we ship.

The 14 day trial period lets users download and use the product offline and then sign in at a later time that works for them. As your trial gets close to expiring we’ll remind you to sign in with notifications in the new notification hub. At the end of the trial period you will be required to sign in to unlock Visual Studio so don’t wait for the last minute.

When we release Visual Studio 2013, we will support the same ways to unlock the product as Visual Studio 2012 including volume licensed builds and entering your own product key. Once you unlock Visual Studio with a product key you can still optionally sign in later to start roaming settings across all your devices.

What to do when there is a service outage?

We work very hard to offer a reliable service with minimum downtime but from time to time service downtime might occur, either due to our scheduled service maintenance to provide you a better service or an unscheduled event in the case we run into trouble. Features like our push notifications for roaming settings and periodic polling will make sure your Visual Studio connection is always up to date and minimize any impact to you if an outage does occur. We take every outage that occurs on our live sites very seriously with a dedicated response teams that respond to automated monitor reports as well as customer feedback.

If you encounter a problem with the experiences I described, the first place to check is the visualstudio.com service status site. This is where our ops team will publish any outages that affect visualstudio.com including those that impact the connected experiences in the Visual Studio client. We’ll keep this site updated with progress as the incident is investigated and follow up with a wrap up postmortem once the incident is resolved. To ask a question about any service on the live site use the Team Foundation Service Forum site.

This is just the beginning…

There are many new opportunities to personalize and improve your Visual Studio experiences as we connect you to new cloud services and capabilities. You’ll see more features throughout Visual Studio use your primary identity to connect to online services and expose new connected features. You’ll also see Visual Studio do a better job of remembering credentials for more connected experiences. Stay tuned for more on these and other changes in a later post.

Feedback

We want to hear your feedback about the new connected IDE experiences to make sure we build the best product for you. As you try these new experiences, sign in with your Microsoft account and roam your settings, then reach up and use the send-a-smile to tell us what is working well and what areas you would like to see us improve the experience for you. If you find a bug use the Connect site to let us know. Bugs logged through connect go directly on to the engineering team’s backlog and are also available for other customers to follow the resolution. If you have ideas of what else you’d like to see create a suggestion on User Voice for the community to vote on.

Finally thank you for taking the time to try out our features and letting us know what you think.

Short Bio – Anthony Cangialosi is a lead program manager for the Visual Studio platform team which works on the core features that all teams in Visual Studio build on and all developers use. Anthony joined the Visual Studio team in 2001 and has worked on a variety of areas including mobile device development the Visual Studio SDK, and the Visual Studio Ecosystem.

Tags

I really and sincerely hope that MS is not planning down the road to go the way of Adobe (creative cloud) and require VS to be subscription based. What a horrible nightmare of a thought to think you can't just buy something and use it like you want.

Please add an option in RTM (tools/options) to turn this off.

4 years ago

EB

Hello Visual Studio DRM! As if developing for Windows 8 was hard enough.

4 years ago

Anders Borum

I second the comment on being able to turn this feature off in RTM. The new release cadence for Visual Studio is great, but don't force developers to sign in just to write software.

4 years ago

Tristan

Please, make this OPTIONALLY. Do not force us to do what we do not want to do.

4 years ago

GregM

Did you people even READ the article before complaining about the sign-in?

We think many of you will sign in and leverage the capabilities that come with signing in, so we want to make sure our online services can handle all of our users registering and synchronizing settings across all their devices with Visual Studio 2013. Leading to this Preview release, we have done load simulation internally, and wanted to extend this verification to real use. In the coming weeks, we will be monitoring service health, measuring service responsiveness, improving performance, and responding to live site issues as they come up, as well as reviewing your feedback on all the connected experiences. By asking all of you to sign in to this pre-release we hope to gather usage data to scale out and support millions of connected users by the time we ship.

When we release Visual Studio 2013, we will support the same ways to unlock the product as Visual Studio 2012 including volume licensed builds and entering your own product key. Once you unlock Visual Studio with a product key you can still optionally sign in later to start roaming settings across all your devices.

4 years ago

Annon

This is creepy. I don't want to have to sign into a tool to be able to use it! It is just a tool, I want to be able to use it like a tool. Please stop!

4 years ago

commongenius

It is unfortunate that I will not be able to use the preview release due to the forced login requirement. I will never use a primarily offline tool that forces me to declare my identity whether I want to or not.

I can't imagine this feature will be of any noticeable benefit to me whatsoever. It's trivially easy to export your settings file and import it on secondary work machines to get the same window layout and colour scheme. I've not found myself wanting this in 15 years of using VS. Why not spend your development time purely on things we're actually asking for on UserVoice & Connect?

4 years ago

George

@GregM – most developers I know don't need such a feature – as long as it's optional from the start (opt-in), it will be fine.

Very few people work on the same project on multiple computers, and if they do, very few people will trust Microsoft (or other external company) for storing all their project settings.

What other advantages than a roaming VS profile is there to this cloud setup? It isn't hard to export/import the profile manually today, and when I use different development machines, I usually have a reason to keep them separate and also utilize different profiles. A few development machines are also completely disconnected from the net due to different requirements and hence cannot use this at all.

4 years ago

Tom

As many commenter noted, I alos do't need this "feature". I wish you would put your developer time on more important things…

And if you really keep goining on, make this company internal hosted based on Active Directory.

4 years ago

LS

If any developers on my team don't know how to migrate settings to another machine then I have failed in that I hired the wrong person.

Can this be turned off via GPO?

4 years ago

Dean J.

As always, it's all in how Microsoft presents it. I doubt you would get much negative feedback if you would have said: "hey, this is going to be here if you're interested in it". But by pushing it, (even though you mention it's not required in RTM), it just sends a wrong vibe. It actually is a good idea to be able to have your settings available on different machines, but the way you're presenting it has a heavy-handed forced feel to it.

That's exactly what it says in the article. It is optional and opt-in. The only condition is that with this particular build, they're giving you a free preview with the condition that after 14 days, you need to sign in to help stress-test their servers.

4 years ago

no_thanks

Please get rid of this. It's an extra piece of spyware which I will have to teach other team members how to avoid and turn off.

4 years ago

S. Colcord

I don't see sufficient benefit in these features to justify even a slight inconvenience while running without a network connection.

The only cloud-based functionality I'd consider valuable is the ability to easily set up Incredibuild-style distributed build farms.

4 years ago

Frank R...

I would enjoy such functionality to keep all relevant settings synchronized for my development PC and laptop (except paths of course). As long as the last synced settings are preserved when I can't log in (there are places without internet connection), and as long as signing in does not affect other programs (don't want to be logged in for all Microsoft services in browser windows as a result of this).

4 years ago

Biren Desai

Such a very informative post. I found very informative stuffs from your post. Nice work.

4 years ago

Glen

I utterly hate the idea of having to sign into Visual Studio. I find it creepy like others do and I don't like the direction this is heading in one bit. I feel with absolute certainty this is the start of an Adobe Creative Cloud play. I feel it is time to ditch this product completely and I think that means it might be time to say goodbye to Windows too. This is clearly another Xbox style bad move in the wings.

4 years ago

Brent Albertson

When I sign in with a Gmail account VS 2013 still says "This license will expire in 7 days" why?

Not sure why everyone is hating on this. I personally like this idea, and as long as it remains optional then everyone should be happy. I haven't tried the 2013 preview yet; will it also sync/install all of your VS extensions too? Firefox does this and I really appreciate it every time I format or setup a new PC. If it could also sync the settings for the extensions that would be gold; I assume this would require an API change that the extension developers would need to utilize, but that would still be a great start. Thanks for the great info 🙂

4 years ago

Hoikas

Why do I need to sign into my IDE? KDevelop doesn't ask for any credentials, nor should VS.

4 years ago

Neil Hodgson

This is a poor idea in general made even worse by failing to work. I've been trying to sign in for 4 days and each time there are several displays of "Loading identity providers…" then it gives up and says:

Something went wrong and we can't sign you in right now. Please try again later.

My Microsoft account is working fine in other situations.

Is this working for anyone?

4 years ago

Andrea Domenichini

Hi,

my VS 2013 Express Preview for Windows license has expired. If I sign out and sign in, the license doesn't renew and I cannot use VS 2013.

How can I renew the license?

4 years ago

Where

Do I subscribe? Do I send in money for a monthly subscription? Is this credit card or bitcoin? Is Adobe involved? Do I need Office365 also?

@Neil & Andrea. I'm sorry that you are hitting an error signing in to Visual Studio. A quick workaround you can try is to run the Developer Command prompt installed with Visual Studio as administrator and then run devenv /resetuserdata. Now try starting Visual Studio and sign in again. If that doesn't unblock you then log a bug using the link below and post the bug here and I will follow up directly through the bug.

I cannot sign in to Visual Studio because we are behind a corporate proxy. I have tried the devenv.exe.config hack, but to no avail. Any ideas ? No problems at home, but we cannot use VS 2013 at work because of this. Very disappointing.

4 years ago

roteague

The last time I tried to install the preview it failed, requiring IE 10. Unfortunately, I am not able to load IE 10 as the corporate standards don't allow it.

I don't mind the idea of cloud-saved settings, I see it as valuable. However, if Microsoft hasn't fixed the ugly UI in at least some respects, I'll be sticking with VS2010.

4 years ago

So obvious

(Smack forehead!) Of course it needs a particular browser be installed to install and run this VS. How is that not so obvious? A browser is an integral part of the OS and this only shows how true that is, has been, and will be even more so in the near future. I look forward to this, even if it is … all over again. Decrees expire. Yay!

The Visual Studio team just patched the production servers to address a bug where Visual Studio Express users in certain time zones were seeing the IDE expire even after signing in with a Microsoft account. If you have Visual Studio Express installed go to the File Account settings menu and click 'Check for an updated license' to resolve the issue. New installs of Visual Studio Express will no longer run into this issue. You can read more about the bug here: connect.microsoft.com/…/unable-to-update-my-license-for-visual-studio-2013-previeww

We're sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate the customer feedback that helped resolve this issue. If you have other issues Signing in to Visual Studio or roaming settings please log them on the Connect site (connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio).

@Nathan.Rozentals. We weren't able to get proxy support fully working in time for the Preview release. We'll have that working before we ship. To work around this bug you can connect to a TFS online account which will bootstrap Visual Studio and then sign in through the id card in the upper right corner as usual.

3) Open VS and click on the Team Connect to Team Foundation Server menu.

4) Click Select Team Project then add your TFS online account and sign in. You'll be prompted to sign in to the proxy server.

5) Select your team project and Connect

6) Now Click on Sign in in the upper right corner.

Anthony

4 years ago

T. Gibson

Makes trying out the RC very hard at my workplace. Development is only permitted on non-internet connected networks (it's a headache for other tools too), we only have net access through a virtualised browser system so it's impossible for VS to connect to the servers to sign in.

4 years ago

Mayank Pipara

Can't connect properly to microsoft account it says 14 days trial left how to solve it ,my is windows 8 professional.

A small number of users have run into a bug that causes VS to repeatedly prompt users to reenter credentials with a warning sign next to their avatar in the upper right corner.

We deployed a fix for this issue in the Preview update you should have received last week. To get the fix first install the Preview update then restart Visual Studio and click the warning sign to reenter you credentials one last time.

Most developers we surveyed actively used at least 2 or more Microsoft accounts for their regular development.

4 years ago

Just me

Sign into the IDE, bad idea for many reasons.. what if your internet is down (Can’t code…) or there servers down (Can’t code…) and the big one if your logged in to Microsoft .. can they look at your code.. What if you have an awesome idea that you have be working on .. next thing you know Microsoft has this new software??? Hum .. it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t gone to court over code disputes before??? To cover them self they should leave it out totally. They already have a camera build into the Xbox1 that stays on all the time, and must update every 24hours (What the Government spying, what???) Clean it up Microsoft I don’t need you knowing when I’m on line or peeking at my code.. Like the new features but that.

4 years ago

Just me

If you think about it, if you wanted to improve on saving user settings, just improve on the import and export settings .. It just seem fishy every video presentation on the IDE sign in subject they act like it’s a touchy subject and are very vague on what the final release will be … hum..

GregM, just be cause they say it now doesn't mean that they will keep it in place. Their throwing it out there to see how many people notice it.

4 years ago

Just me

Ok let's look at this IDE sign in a professionally manor from a coders stand point… It an extra security risk that doesn't need to be there.. There you have it, a legit reason not to have it in the IDE.

Later

4 years ago

Brien K.

So if I cannot do work for a customer because I cannot get into VS2013 because of some login issue, who do I send the bill to for lost revenue and potentially a lost customer?

4 years ago

MS

How do I enter a key if I have no internet?

You didn't require internet did you?

MS has completely driven me to minimum productivity.

4 years ago

xbox one

Forcing users to login to everything is not going to help drive developers to use your products.

free people like choice. MS leaves us with so little choice.

wake up will you?

4 years ago

xbox one

btw, when you interview developers for their opinion. do it outside of your company.

I wonder who you interviewed when you decided to take the start menu out of windows 8?

Funny, the next day at MS everyone installed third party start menus.

brilliant.

leading, is not copying apple.

4 years ago

Kevin

i cant open VS 2013 Ultimate after i installed it, it is expired already i cant open it the only button is CLOSE, i have a license key but cant enter it. Help me please.

4 years ago

MTM 2013 requires normal key, but it does not work

Why the sign-in logic was not consistently introduced into MTM 2013 as well. There is still clasical keycode required, but the one provided at MSDN subscription does not work.

4 years ago

Greg Mulert

I don't like the sign-in. 🙁

4 years ago

Greg Mulert

I have the released Visual Studio 2013 Premium edition installed. If I go to Help->Register Product it says I have 88 days remaining. I am logged in to a Microsoft Account. This is a company account for me but has not had one of the company subscriptions assigned to it. We have 35 premium MSDN subscriptions. I want one key for 35 people. If I ask our admin for a product key for Visual Studio 2012. He generates it and gives it to me no problem. If I ask our admin for a product key for Visual Studio 2013. He clicks the button and gets this message…

"The product key is not embedded with Visual Studio 2013. When you launch the product, you must sign in with the Microsoft account associated with your MSDN subscription and your IDE will automatically activate. By signing in, your IDE settings will sync across devices, and you can connect to online developer services, blah blah blah"

Someone from Microsoft please explain…

4 years ago

Paul

REALLY REALLY CONFUSING!!!!!

I'm getting This License Will expire in 7 Days Notification WHY.

"When I click on the Product Key button in MSDN" It Says

blah blah blah……..When you launch the product, you must sign in with the Microsoft account associated with your MSDN subscription and your IDE will automatically activate. By signing in, your IDE settings will sync across devices, and you can connect to online developer services.

We only have ONE MSDN email address that we sign in to MSDN with and we don't not give a *** about saving settings across machines.

YET another poorly implemented feature (If you can call it that) plus its undocumented as usual, unless you call a blog official documentation.

VS 2012 is unable due to the crap UI.

VS 2013 is unusable due to poorly implemented spyware licensing.

Looks like it's back to VS 2010.

Paul

4 years ago

MRR111

Currently cannot sign-in on my VS2013. Trial period will finish in 5 days. I have an MSDN subscription. When I click the sign-in button, a message appears "Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation."

Any ideas?

4 years ago

Ilya Biryukov [MSFT]

@MRR111, I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing this bug. For Visual Studio team to investigate, can you submit the bug please in connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio It would really help to have the call stack of the exception in the connect bug.

It sounds like you might have some mismatched bits. Repairing VS may fix the issue and unblock you.

4 years ago

Cygon

I find this to be quite an appalling development for the Visual Studio IDE.

I do not want my settings in the cloud. I do not want to have to create multiple accounts so I can manage my work persona (tabs mandatory) and private persona (tabs outlawed).

I also do not want to be forced into yet another Microsoft head-trip (i.e. "we are introducing a top level online identity") that sets in stone some stupendously outlandish assumptions about my workflow or how I use my computer(s). I do not even want to tell Microsoft about my workflows.

Finally, I do not want the Visual Studio team to spend time finding absurd use cases for online identities instead of improving the product.

My sincerest wish is for you to remove this feature – optional or not – and never think about it again.

This door, once opened, will just lead to more ball chains being added. You already broke your word here: "we will support the same ways to unlock the product as Visual Studio 2012 including volume licensed builds and entering your own product key."

4 years ago

MRR111

Unfortunately it isn't optional. MSDN accounts do not have the option. They must sign in.

The issue is reported on Connect and has received no follow-up from MS. I have reinstalled VS2013 and repaired dot net 4.5.1 without issue resolution. No RC or CTP was ever installed on this machine. I'm locked out of VS2013 so for a person who loves the previous VS releases and has sat on the bleeding edge for years, this is the worst possible experience. I can't even open the product.

I agree its a good idea to be able to migrate towards a single sign-on; merging different accounts created in the past into one. However, my initial experience with the 2013 sign-in was not good. Not remembering I already had an account, I filled out the form to create a new one only to get a message saying the email address I entered was already used. Fair enough. I clicked the sign-in button only to find there is no "forgot password" link, so I'm stuck at this point.

4 years ago

cppprogrammer@live.com

Appears that installation of "Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools" can break VS2013 sign in as it installs dot net framework DLLs into the GAC. Then Visual Studio will use those DLLs rather than the 4.5.1 DLLs for the sign-in and fail.

4 years ago

rahoolm

Not possible to login to VS site as access to login.live is restricted in our org.

How to do this manually or registered from home and use it in office? Is there any other way to create user and login to vstudio site?

4 years ago

Cannot sign in from behind proxy

Hello.

Like most professionnals programmers, I work in an environment where we use a proxy to protect our internal network.

I have been given the ISO and asked to test VS 2013 and make a comparison with VS 2012 which is currently our main tool (as all our >4000 servers are loaded with 3.5 .Net).

Installation was fast and OK. Problem : it cannot let me sign in, because you cannot use this program from behind a proxy.

Do you realize that most people work from proxied environments today ?

I am now gonna send an email : cannot be validated as is.

4 years ago

Ilya Biryukov [MSFT]

@Cannot sign in from behind proxy

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing this issue. Is your proxy just blocking sign in requests, or it requires authentication and doesn't let you pass until you enter your user name and the password for the proxy?

Visual Studio does understand when there is a proxy that requires authentication and should ask for credentials. Same would happen for start page news feeds or Extension and Updates dialog. If this is the case and VS doesn't ask for proxy creds when it should, please file a bug under connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio.

If your proxy is just blocking traffic to certain servers, you'd need to configure it to allow these servers:

Another issue I have is expiry of credentials. Using my MSDN account, I periodically have to "re-activate" Visual Studio. It's like the product has degraded into a subscription based model which does leave a bad taste in the mouth when compared to the previous license model.

3 years ago

SamCPP

It's like a constant reminder that I can lose the ability to develop at any time. If your AUTH servers have problems or my internet is out when it deactivates, I'm stuffed. Tick tick tick…

3 years ago

David Hunter

Sadly whether you think this is a good thing or not the VS 2013 license model is a DISASTER.

I have now had three occasions where VS fails to license properly and I then spend hours on the phone trying to get it resolved. While doing so I can do no work whatsoever, there is no temporary work around. In my latest example I just installed VS 2013 Update 2. This led VS to forget my MSDN subscription details so it thinks I am trying to use a trial license that as expired. The problem in this case is that the pop up box that VS uses to tell me this is modal and all it lets me do is quit Visual Studio so I can't hit the Sign In button!!! Amusingly the dialog says "Start Visual Studio to fix this issue"

My view is that if MS are going to use this licensing model they HAVE to provide a temporary work around for when they're licensing system doesn't work.

@David Hunter. I'm really sorry you've been having so much trouble with getting VS licensed. It sounds like you haven't had much luck with tech support so I would like to get the engineering team to work with you directly to see if we have a bug or scenario we didn't consider. If you would like you can log a bug on connect or email me directly at anthony.cangialosi at microsoft . com

-Anthony

3 years ago

MRR111

Sign in for Visual Studio MSDN accounts is a *really* bad idea. A few times already in 6 months I have been locked out of VS2013 because my login was "somehow" disassociated with our company MSDN subscription (not by our MSDN administrator either). It took 3 days for the reactivation to come through. That is crazy. Imagine a business relying on VS2013 in such circumstances. 3 day outtage? Insanity.

We have proactively recognised this and prohibited any requirement to use VS2013 (i.e. dot net 4.5.1 and higher) in all development until we address this issue in licensing. We simply cannot take the risk that the development product would suddenly not work. As a Gold Partner development company, this is a very worrying situation where we have to avoid using a major update of the development platform!

3 years ago

Daniel

really hate that "feature"

3 years ago

jc

I am unable to use Visual Studio 2013 at all now – I'd installed an earlier community version, now whenever I try to run VS, it tells me my license has expired, but the login dialog is bugged.